Does Sentence Completion Improve Critical Thinking?

What do you think about short writing activities where students are simply asked to complete sentences? Does sentence completion invite critical thinking and give us more perspective on how our students think? Following are some examples. What would you do with student responses? Please provide more!

Sentence Completion

  • If I were ............ I would............
  • Most people think I am .........., but I'm really ...............
  • If I could write a book, I would write about ...............
  • Writing is ...............
  • To write well, I must ....................
  • My life would be very different if..............
  • If I could, I would ...................
  • I don't understand ............

Leecy Wise, Moderator
Reading and Writing CoP
leecywise@gmail.com

 

Comments

I really enjoy using sentence completion activities and have even expanded them into a paragraph form. For lower levels it is a great structure to give the student confidence in expressing themselves, and it also gets the student over the hurdle of staring at a blank page and not knowing where to begin. For higher levels it works more as a writing prompt just to get them started, then they can write sentences about the topic on their own. For all levels I appreciate that it helps the students have something to share with the class that they feel confident about.

To answer your question, I don't know how often sentence completion activities invite critical thinking but I find that they almost always facilitate the expression of whatever critical thinking is already happening.

You make great points, Elena. I love the ways in which you use sentence completion. We could even take things a bit further and consider different types of sentence combining using incomplete sentences. Hmmmm... I wonder what that would look like. Thanks much.

What do others here think? Leecy

Hello Leecy, Elena and all, For English learners, we often use sentence starters (or sentence frames) for both speaking and writing support. English learners benefit when teachers give them the language they need to understand how English works. This support helps to further develop their language skills.

Stanford University professor Jeff Zwiers has developed some useful resources to help foster academic language in speaking, but these tools may also support writing. In Zwiers' Constructive Conversation Skills Poster, he emphasizes academic language for critical thinking. This tool includes question starters to help students begin conversations related to academic content as well as sentence starters for the words they can use to respond to a peer's questions. This handout features the language needed to build on one another's idea through evaluating, comparing, clarifying, creating and fortifying concepts-- all essential critical thinking skills.

Members can you see yourself using a tool like this? If so, how might you adapt it for your own context? Although this is a tool designed for specifically for speaking, do you think it could it be drawn upon for writing?

Jeff Zwiers has written many books on academic language, and he is incredibly generous about sharing his resources. You can find many helpful tools for fostering constructive conversations in all subject areas--including for math-- at the link above.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition CoP